Achievement Preview Spotlight: The Evil Within

With The Evil Within survival horror legend Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil and Dino Crisis fame hopes to revitalise the genre with a game that is committed to scaring the ever loving crud out of you. But do the game's achievements help with that lofty goal and send tingles down your spine or do they leave you pointing and laughing at the supposed scary stuff, daring them to do better? Step inside our Achievement Preview Spotlight to find out. But be careful: once you enter, you might not ever leave...

The first thing to point out is that the achievement lists for both the 360 and the One version are identical, with both getting 41 achievements for 1000G. Out of all of those, there are eight secret achievements to discover. Whether these are the "What's in that box? Oh it's just a cat" kind of secrets or the "What's in that box? OHMYGODIT'SEATINGMYFACE" kind of secrets remains, well, a secret for now.

Interestingly, there are ten achievements that seem to be related to story progression in the list as they have "Chapter ##" at the end of each description. However, looking at the descriptions closely, I get the feeling that they are actually optional actions that can be performed or criteria that needs to be fulfilled in that chapter, rather than achievements that will unlock naturally as you progress. Take a look at the descriptions for the likes of:

Those sound very much like choices or optional actions to me. As such, I'd assume that these all have the possibility to be missable, unless the game contains a Chapter Select option.

Unusually for a survival horror title, the game seems to feature quite an in-depth upgrade system, at least if the achievements are anything to go by. Using a mysterious green gel that is reminiscent of the reagent from the Re-Animator movies, protagonist Sebastian Castellanos can upgrade his own abilities and those of his arsenal. Not content with rewarding players for simply dipping their toes in the upgrade system's waters, the following three achievements task them with fully upgrading each key area.

Whether this is in a single playthrough or if upgrades carry over across multiple playthroughs isn't known.

Strange green goo isn't the only thing Sebastian will be ferreting around for when he's cowering in a corner attempting not to wet his trousers. The following achievement tasks the player with locating all of the game's collectibles. Every single one. Hey, maybe there's just three or four, but I'm thinking probably not.

The new breed of survival horror that started with Amnesia: The Dark Descent and has made its way onto the Xbox with the likes of Outlast and last week's Alien: Isolation encourages stealth and avoidance from over-powered enemies to build sustained terror rather than open conflict. The Evil Within sticks up a big, bloody, middle finger stump to that nonsense and relishes in its ghastly, gory action. A sizeable chunk of the game's achievements are related to good old fashioned killing; from sneak kills to burning kills and explosive kills to Agony Bolt kills (sounds like fun!) and, when all that fails, a few punches to the head.

When it comes to killing, it's not just variety that the achievements encourage, but volume. How much killing you ask? How about 400 big ones?

Presumably that's across multiple playthroughs instead of just one playthrough massacre. Either way, Sebastian's going to get his hands very, very bloody.

Once you've made your way through the terror, you'll be rewarded with the standard completion achievements for whichever difficulty you've chosen to approach it on: Casual, Survival and Nightmare. If Nightmare sounds like a cakewalk to you though, you can always try Akumu mode. "Akumu" roughly translates from Japanese as "worst dream", which apparently means worse than your worse nightmares, so this mode takes Nightmare mode and sends it crying under the bed. Mikami has stated that playing this mode will require high levels of mental and technical abilities. Presumably it'll also require some spare sets of pants nearby. Completing the mode will net you:

If challenging yourself to completing the game on the varying difficulties isn't enough, there are also two achievements that challenge players to complete the game under certain constraints. The first is for speed-running the whole game under five hours and the second is for completing it without any of those lovely green upgrades.

I'm guessing Casual is the difficulty to go for both of these, but I challenge you, dear TA'ers, to do it on Akumu mode for the sheer torturous hell of it. Mwah hah hah!! Oh, sorry, I let the evil within out a little bit there.

If there's an upcoming game or DLC pack that you'd like to see featured in the Achievement Preview Spotlight, be sure to let us know in the comments!